Generating business logic based on UML profiles

Code generation spreads more and more in enterprise software development. Model based software development permits the generation of the source code of objects from a well-designed model with a suited program. This eases development work in many ways: on the one hand the source code becomes more transparent and uniform, on the other hand the model and the code stays coherent, model changes can be introduced in the code easily and immediately.

One of the key issues in enterprise software development is the phrasing of business rules, namely the description of the relationships between objects and operations in the software model. OCL, which is an extension of the UML standard to draft business rules is the best fit. Instead of UML which is graphical, OCL is textual so generating code from it is more difficult.

In my thesis I will extend an existing static code generator. One of my targets is to integrate the OCL processing into the existing code generation process. Another goal is to create a framework which can runs the generated business rules automatically.